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"We've got to expect everybody to at least try to live within the budget that was established," said an incredulous Portune prior to the first formal session of 2015.

Hamilton County Commissioners set the prosecutor's budget at $12,263,000.

Already, Prosecutor Joe Deters has signaled he will need $821,000 more than that.

"I'm sympathetic," Portune stressed. "I know they need more money. I tried to get them more money."

That was a reference to his unsuccessful proposal for a quarter-cent increase in the county sales tax, an idea that failed to garner any support from the Republican majority on the commission.

So Portune is left with what seems like a perennial problem: guess at what the budget needs for the prosecutor are and dig for additional funding when the office indicates it needs more to fulfill its job description in the overall county justice system.

It boils down to a matter of who controls the purse strings.

By state law, the courts set the desired dollar figure for the prosecutor. Think of it as amount X.

County government must provide it somehow. That could be by more revenue, savings through cutbacks or dipping into reserves.

"In terms of county government, it's just a terrible way to run the business," stated Portune, who sees a potential for budget anarchy.

County Administrator Christian Sigman emphasizes there's always cooperation with the prosecutor, a joint effort to reduce any overage.

"It's in the ballpark," Sigman reassured the commission Wednesday morning. "We knew this was coming. They do it every year about this time."

One could legitimately say commissioners set budget goals for the prosecutor's office as opposed to hard-and-fast limits.

"They have the legal right to spend as much as they need," Commission President Chris Monzel said.

An engineer by trade with a penchant for analyzing data, Monzel feels the exasperation that seems built into the budget process.

“It can get very frustrating to say, ‘Well, wait a minute,’ you know, ‘Why can't we get this to be a better fine-tuned process?’” Monzel said.

What could work in the county's favor this year is an improving economy, one that might result in greater sales tax revenue. If that surplus is realized, some or all of it could be applied to offset the higher-than-expected prosecutor's budget amount. It would erase the option of dipping into the reserve fund, which county leaders view as a last resort possibility.

No one at the county level is advocating a change in government structure as a way to gain more control over departmental budgets.

But two counties in the state have shifted from statutory to charter counties. Ohio law provides for such a change. The other option would involve the state legislature, which has shown little or no interest in making any change to the ability of the court system to decide what's needed for yearly budgets.

So if there is desire for a corrective approach to have tighter control over certain budgets, the law permits it.

The prosecutor's office chose not to address the matter Wednesday since it is early in the year and no one knows with a solid degree of certainty how much will have been spent by mid-summer or fall.

But Deters wants the community to know it is always mindful of the limits of county budgets.